The heat generated by burning a fossil fuel is surpassed within a few months by the warming caused by the release of its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to new work from Carnegie's Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira ...

The National Institutes of Natural Sciences, National Institute for Fusion Science and The University of Tokyo Graduate School of Frontier Sciences Department of Advanced Materials Science research group have developed an ...

Mars. It's a pretty unforgiving place. On this dry, dessicated world, the average surface temperature is -55 °C (-67 °F). And at the poles, temperatures can reach as low as -153 °C (243 °F). Much of that has to do with ...

The carbon dioxide (CO2) at the Bravo Dome gas field in New Mexico is volcanic in origin, and its emplacement began more than a million years ago, not 10 thousand years ago, as previously estimated. Averaged across the reservoir, ...

A University of Washington oceanographer has helped create the first full-color photographic atlas of the ocean floor. "Discovering the Deep: A Photographic Atlas of the Seafloor and Ocean Crust" (Cambridge University Press, ...

Water contamination by hormone-disrupting pollutants is threatening water quality around the world. Existing research has determined that harmful concentrations of Bisphenol-A (BPA), a chemical used in consumer products such ...

Atmosphere

An atmosphere (from Greek ατμός - atmos, 'vapor' + σφαίρα - sphaira, 'sphere') is a layer of gases that may surround a material body of sufficient mass, by the gravity of the body, and are retained for a longer duration if gravity is high and the atmosphere's temperature is low. Some planets consist mainly of various gases, but only their outer layer is their atmosphere (see gas giants).

The term stellar atmosphere describes the outer region of a star, and typically includes the portion starting from the opaque photosphere outwards. Relatively low-temperature stars may form compound molecules in their outer atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere, which contains oxygen used by most organisms for respiration and carbon dioxide used by plants, algae and cyanobacteria for photosynthesis, also protects living organisms from genetic damage by solar ultraviolet radiation. Its current composition is the product of billions of years of biochemical modification of the paleoatmosphere by living organisms.